In 1966, there was no SAS.

But there was a need for a computerized statistics program to analyze vast amounts of agricultural data collected through
United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) grants.

Then research started by University Statisticians Southern Experiment Stations, Eight land-grant universities that received the majority of their research funding from the USDA. And some schools came together under a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop a general-purpose statistical software package to analyze all the agricultural data they were generating.

North Carolina State University, located in the capital city of Raleigh, North Carolina became the leader in the consortium.

North Carolina State University faculty members

Jim Goodnight and Jim Barr

Emerged as the project leaders –
Barr creating the architecture and
Goodnight implementing the features

In 1972 NIH stopped to give funds to this team, then the consortium agreed to chip in $5,000 apiece each year to allow NCSU to continue developing and maintaining the system and supporting their statistical analysis needs.

During the coming years, SAS software was licensed by pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies and banks, as well as by the academic community that had given birth to the project.

Jane Helwig, another Statistics Department employee at NCSU, Joined the project consortium as documentation writer

John Sall, a graduate student and programmer, rounded out the core team

Incorporation

In 1976 Goodnight, Barr, Helwig and Sall left NCSU and formed
SAS Institute Inc. – a private company “devoted to the maintenance and further development of SAS.” They opened offices in a building #2806 Hillsborough Street, across from the university.

By 1980, the growing company building capacity is not sufficient in Hillsborough Street building, and then it’s moved to the site of its present headquarters offices just outside Raleigh in Cary, North Carolina. In that time employs were 20.

In this time SAS was growing, the entire computer hardware and software industry was changing, with new operating systems and platforms placing new demands on software developers one of the first steps for SAS was to adapt the software to operate on IBM’s Disk Operating System (DOS).

Now it is working on different operating systems like windows, Dos, Z/OS, UNIX and various UNIX flavors.

In 1990 SAS Company grow with employ force of 7000.

SAS celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2001,

Its turn out from various difficulties along with the millennium and the Y2K frenzy. And they created new logo and tagline presently which we are seeing Tagline is –

THE POWER TO KNOW®

SAS has been named one of FORTUNE magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” every year since 1998 and no1 in 2010

SAS named the best company to work for in 2010 by FORTUNE.

SAS IS MULTI VENDOR ARCHITECTURE
Multi Vendor Architecture is the foundation of the cross-platform portability and Interoperability of the SAS system means it allows programs to be written once and run anywhere, regardless of hardware or operating system. This architecture provides customers with hardware independence and a flexible implementation.

SAS IS MULTI DATABASE ARCHITECTURE
SAS can connect to any kind of data source to read the data, that’s why SAS is Multi Database Architecture.

Data sources are databases (like Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, Sybase, Teradata, Informix and MS-Access etc…)
Or Files (like Excel, CSV, and Notepads etc…)